From Plant Gene Editing to Better Crops: Meet 2026 WHD Fellow Ryan Swanson
Ryan Swanson’s passion for science began just up the hill from his childhood home in Duluth, Minnesota, where researchers at Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory studied migratory hawks. As a boy, Ryan had the chance to interact with both the scientists and the birds they studied—including holding a young hawk.
That early fascination with the natural world stayed with him. At the University of Minnesota, Ryan initially considered biomedical engineering before choosing biochemistry and discovering the possibilities of synthetic biology. Then, as an undergraduate researcher in the lab of renowned plant geneticist Dan Voytas, PhD, he found his field.
He spent three-and-a-half years in the Voytas Lab working on cutting-edge plant gene editing before coming to Missouri to join the lab of Danforth Center Principal Investigator R. Keith Slotkin, PhD.
Now a sixth-year PhD candidate at the University of Missouri and member of the Slotkin lab at the Danforth Center, Ryan has been named the 2026 William H. Danforth Fellow. The fellowship is awarded to outstanding PhD students whose research demonstrates great promise for advancing plant science.
Solving a Plant Science Bottleneck
Ryan’s research addresses a long-standing challenge that has slowed crop improvement. Scientists have become increasingly adept at disrupting or deleting DNA in plants. But precisely adding new DNA exactly where researchers want it has remained much harder. Traditional methods can insert DNA randomly, requiring researchers to screen many plants to find the desired result. That adds time and expense to a crop-development process that can already take eight to 15 years.
“Plant science touches everybody. We all need to eat,” Ryan says. “As we move into the future and have to confront a laundry list of rising problems, being able to iterate and develop solutions to these problems as quickly as possible is critical.”
Those problems include disease, drought, and the need to produce more food in increasingly challenging conditions.
Putting DNA Where It Belongs
Ryan is helping advance Transposon-Assisted Homology-Independent Targeted Integration, or TAHITI, a first-of-its-kind technology developed in the Slotkin Lab. TAHITI harnesses naturally occurring pieces of DNA called transposable elements and combines them with CRISPR-Cas technology to place new DNA at a user-defined location in a plant genome. The Slotkin Lab has demonstrated highly efficient targeted insertion in both Arabidopsis (the lab rat of the plant world) and soybean.
Instead of relying on a lucky genetic outcome, scientists can begin to “glue” new DNA directly where they want it.
Ryan has helped push the technology dramatically forward. Early versions inserted about 430 base pairs of DNA. Ryan has demonstrated insertion of more than 25,000 base pairs—enough to potentially introduce complex, multigene packages in a single step. He has also helped improve the system’s efficiency. “In his five years in the lab, Ryan has improved the technology from 35% efficient to near 99%,” Slotkin says.
That progress is already moving beyond the laboratory. TAHITI has become the foundation for Spearhead Bio, a company spun out of the Slotkin Lab to advance the technology toward commercial applications. Slotkin is the company’s founder and chief scientific officer.
Tiny Improvements, Big Impact
Ryan describes his research as an iterative process: design, build, test, learn, and then do it again. “I love making minute improvements that add up to keep the pipeline moving faster,” says Ryan. “My long-term goal is to reduce the time it takes for plant biologists to provide solutions to large global challenges.”
For Slotkin, Ryan represents exactly the kind of scientist the region needs: someone who can turn discovery into technology—and technology into impact. “Ryan represents exactly the type of talent we are trying to attract to St. Louis,” says Slotkin. “Someone who is creating the next generation of plant improvement technology to deliver improved crops faster and cheaper.”
About the Fellowship
Learn more about the William H. Danforth Fellowship and how it supports promising graduate students in plant science.